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Quasar

Doom Wiki

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In any case, it (the wikia) reminds me of those late-game Wolfenstein 3d levels full of ugly shiny beige walls and wooden panels, particularly the very last level of all the nocturnal missions.

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fraggle said:

It shouldn't be too much work to move the site to a new host. They provide downloadable database dumps. The images and other files might need to be downloaded separately. It should "just" be a matter of finding a new host, installing MediaWiki and loading the database. It's probably slightly more complicated than that in practise of course :-)

The experiences of a prior admin in moving a wiki off the site:
http://deriksmith.livejournal.com/29985.html

Could be highly useful.

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Yeah, I saw some upheaval about the new MANDATORY skin bullshit earlier, and frankly, it sucks. This is the last straw that broke the camel's back for me. What's stopping Doomworld from hosting the wiki itself? Is it about the wiki software?

edit: thread was open for a pretty long time, didn't see the new posts, so most what I said has already been mentioned. Meh, point still stands.

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The wiki software is just open source MediaWiki. Same as the one used by dedicated hosts for the Doomsday Wiki (http://dengine.net/dew/), Doom Legacy Wiki (http://legacywiki.net/), Eternity Wiki (http://eternity.youfailit.net/), Odamex Wiki (http://odamex.net/wiki/), Skulltag Wiki (http://www.skulltag.com/wiki/), Vavoom Wiki (http://www.vavoom-engine.com/wiki/) and ZDoom Wiki (http://zdoom.org/wiki/).

So nothing prevents transferring the content to another MediaWiki setup somewhere.

And yes, the experience of the Transformers wiki is helpful, since it says what to watch out for (e.g. the export spam).

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hervoheebo said:

What's stopping Doomworld from hosting the wiki itself? Is it about the wiki software?

I was going to suggest something like that. I mean, Doomworld hosts the /idgames archives and a number of official mod pages(plus a lot of other things), I think hosting the wiki would fit right in, unless the potential volume of traffic could be an issue.

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Xeros612 said:

I was going to suggest something like that. I mean, Doomworld hosts the /idgames archives and a number of official mod pages(plus a lot of other things), I think hosting the wiki would fit right in, unless the potential volume of traffic could be an issue.

First off Doomworld answers to a higher, corporate authority itself. Approval would have to be granted, and we'd have to be reasonably sure about the permanence of such a solution, and given the fact I can't even access my own hosting here any more, I'm not so sure any of that's a given.

There have also been historical problems with the stability of and access to php, email, and some other web services on this server.

If we ended up establishing an independent wiki, I'd most like to see it on an independent server. Like I said before, I am willing to donate or even completely manage acquisition of the hosting resources if necessary. Like I also said before, however, I'm not qualified to administer the thing, so I'd be inviting the existing admins to take care of that - they would have (besides wiki admin access) full access to the server.

However we can't really go on like this without making this a community process. If most of the wiki editing community, and especially the admins, are not on board, there is no use progressing. If we create a schism in the community, there will be a price to pay from now on that cannot be undone.

Obviously I'm in, fraggle is strongly in favor, and Janizdreg is at least sympathetic in that he's OK with the changes but doesn't necessarily like the direction things could head in. What about the other moderators and admins? Bloodshedder in particular, as he'd be my primary candidate for making the thing run, given he has serious experience doing so with other wikis such as the Eternity wiki.

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The biggest problem would be to transfer the wiki to another server, without a clean backup from wikia.
Hosting services are cheap today. I have a hosting provider, who give me 15 GB space, 500 GB monthly traffic, 5 domains, unlimited subdomains, 25 mySQL Databases and many more, for approximately 15 Euro/month.

And if you ask me, i would not use another wikia-like provider. Chances, that they would grow unusable, or even close their doors are given.

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Quasar said:

Obviously I'm in, fraggle is strongly in favor, and Janizdreg is at least sympathetic in that he's OK with the changes but doesn't necessarily like the direction things could head in. What about the other moderators and admins?

Well, if it wasn't clear, I am in favor. (Yes I am a Doom wiki admin now.)

Though as long as MonoBook can override whatever ridiculous skin wikia is pushing, I'm also fine with staying on Wikia. I'm just not sure how long they'll keep it.

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printz said:

What about "You fail it"?

It's not very polite to volunteer somebody's private server space when they haven't personally gotten involved in this yet. I have no idea if Bloodshedder's hosting would be sufficient or not, given that he already hosts a number of things on it. Only he could answer that.

Anyway let's not put people on the spot, because after all, if he's unable or unwilling, it is simple to acquire the resources necessary to do it.

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Quasar said:

It's not very polite to volunteer somebody's private server space when they haven't personally gotten involved in this yet.

Okay, sorry. I guess the same thing applies to "Mancubus", so okay.

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While I am not opposed to the idea of hosting the wiki on my hosting account, I am limited to 100MB of storage space per database. This means that I would run out of space after the wiki reached approximately 10,000 articles. (The current complete database dump is 25MB, and there are 2,700 articles, so it's a rough estimate.) At the current rate of growth, space would be at a premium by October of 2030.

Okay, well maybe it isn't that huge of a problem right now, but who knows what the rate of growth could become.

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Blegh, I hate that ugly nasty brown skin and the lack of the sidebar. I don't like it one bit....

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A few things:

  • I think it's premature to move because of the skin, as they haven't fully implemented it yet, are making some changes due to user input, and we haven't necessarily experimented it enough to know whether it's really such a big problem.
  • Almost no one here is considering whether what Wikia is doing makes any sense, or taking into account their arguments about the change.
  • Whether or not to move should depend more on the impact of the changes on the wiki, and not the reactions of a small number of people from "the community".
  • The Doom wiki, being on Wikia, is on neutral ground and a "no man's land" that grants it a certain outlooking character and a degree of independence from community interests. Private individuals owning it (by paying for or running the servers) may be cool people and all, but they are still humans with personal interests.
So I think that, at least, some time must be allowed to pass to see the effects of the changes on the wiki itself. If these are adverse enough to outweigh the benefits of the fourth item above, and any benefits from the changes, I may be inclined to support and follow a migration.

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I have to disagree. Wikia is on my blacklist of untrustworthy sites and I won't change that. In other words: The Doom Wiki is in a place I won't visit until absolutely necessary. It may not bother you but this skin change is not the trigger for our dissatisfaction but more or less the final straw in a website steadily going downwards.

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myk said:

The Doom wiki, being on Wikia, is on neutral ground and a "no man's land" that grants it a certain outlooking character and a degree of independence from community interests. Private individuals owning it (by paying for or running the servers) may be cool people and all, but they are still humans with personal interests.

The same can be said of the current admin roster. Who, after all, are the people actually involved in the Doom wiki community, rather than the tech guys at Wikia's server farm.

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Is it coincidence or marketing that the Doom wiki has 2666 pages exactly by the time of this hugely complained change?

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Hey guys. I am offering to buy a domain and get a webhost (one.com). How much interest is there in this? Also how much space would the doom wiki take up with the screenshots, etc. I am talking with Quasar on IRC about this and he said the backbone wiki takes about 25mb atm. Does anyone have other suggestions?

(oh, I saw bloodshedder said 25mb too)

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After observing and reading through the discussions on several of the wikis that have moved I have come to various conclusions which might impact the course of this. Here is what I feel I've learned:

  • Because the Wikia wiki cannot be removed and will not be allowed to carry links to the new one outside of user pages such as blogs or talk pages, it is useless to try to establish one as being more official than the other. People will continue to use whichever they want, and nobody has a right to try to prevent that. The best that can be done is encouragement to use the new independent one here and elsewhere through the community.
  • Because people will do whatever they want to do, and because it is impossible to judge what a true representative sample of the userbase wants (it's impossible to even determine a representative sample size), it becomes somewhat useless - disingenious even - to stage fakey voting events for whether a "move" (which is inevitably a fork and not a move) will take place or not. The will of the few will ultimately answer one way or the other while the rest are left out. This will be divisive no matter how it is phrased or glossed over. A mandate cannot be claimed simply because X people out of Z said yes.
  • It is and has always been legally permissible to fork the wiki. It is and has always been ethically permissible to fork the wiki - indeed its license ensures this is possible, to prevent any entity from maintaining total control of the information. Taking all three of these together I come up with the following conclusion.
We may as well just do it already. To that end I've registered three domain names which will be mapped to the new hosting as soon as it is operational.

Please realize - It's not that I don't *care* whether or not most people are on board with it. Indeed I hope that they will be. It's just that I see the sad futility of waiting to see how many are or are not when the "be bold" policy seems like it would work just as well, and lead to the same results regardless.

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Quasar said:

Because the Wikia wiki cannot be removed and will not be allowed to carry links to the new one outside of user pages such as blogs or talk pages, it is useless to try to establish one as being more official than the other.



Well, that's the risk you take if handing over your data to corporate goons. Now they have control and they won't give it away.

I think the only way would be to slowly but steadily destroy the info on the old Wiki so that the normal users won't notice that its contents are degrading before it's too late.

Judging from the contribution statistics it looks like all major content contributors would stop once the Wiki is forked so the old one will sooner or later become obsolete but one could help speeding up the process...

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No need for insidious sabotage. Just not taking care of it anymore -- no longer reverting malicious or misguided edits, no longer fixing the frequently broken syntax and spelling of anonymous contributors, etc. -- will be enough to let it slowly degrade into an Internet compost heap.

Unless a new batch of caretakers appear, as it may happen.

Anyway, all Doom wiki links on the ZDoom wiki are done through a couple of templates, so it will be easy to update all these links at once. (For the matter, so are the links on the Slade wiki.)

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myk said:

A few things:

  • I think it's premature to move because of the skin, as they haven't fully implemented it yet, are making some changes due to user input, and we haven't necessarily experimented it enough to know whether it's really such a big problem.

It's not just the skin - Wikia has deteriorated gradually over the past couple of years. We've had the current skin imposed on us as well without our approval as well, AFAIK. Intrusive ads are inserted into pages, and random Wikia people have come in and overhauled the front page without asking us (happened a while ago, I think it was reverted in the end)

  • Almost no one here is considering whether what Wikia is doing makes any sense, or taking into account their arguments about the change.

  • They haven't provided any. They haven't asked us before making this change whether we wanted it. They haven't provided the option of opting out that I can tell. It certainly doesn't sound like they would be willing to listen.

    It's not our fault that Wikia isn't interested in discussion.

  • Whether or not to move should depend more on the impact of the changes on the wiki, and not the reactions of a small number of people from "the community".

  • I think this is why Quasar created the thread. Certainly there will be an impact on the Doom wiki. I think it will be worth the trouble.

  • The Doom wiki, being on Wikia, is on neutral ground and a "no man's land" that grants it a certain outlooking character and a degree of independence from community interests. Private individuals owning it (by paying for or running the servers) may be cool people and all, but they are still humans with personal interests.

  • Private individuals with their own interests have *always* been able to control the wiki. We have admins who control it. Whether we have sensible, neutral admins is much more of an issue than who owns the server.

    So I think that, at least, some time must be allowed to pass to see the effects of the changes on the wiki itself. If these are adverse enough to outweigh the benefits of the fourth item above, and any benefits from the changes, I may be inclined to support and follow a migration.

    Personally I think it's had enough time already.

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    Red links on a brown background? Apparently there's no colour blindness wiki...

    And how hard would it be to modify all the links in comments in Doomworld's database to the Doom Wiki to point to the new site instead? That should help Google figure out which site to link to. (Or does PageRank ignore forum posts?)

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    printz said:

    Okay, sorry. I guess the same thing applies to "Mancubus", so okay.

    I have already volunteered my services. Considering I have an actual dedicated server on a fast pipe with plenty of speed and storage that's underutilized and no corporate overlords, I think it's the optimal choice short of going to another farm.

    But like Quasar has pointed out, there is no "moving" - it's merely forking and letting the collective community decide through actions of maintenance and expansion which one is the active, primary choice.

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    I haven't contributed to the wiki for quite a while, but if I were still a regular I'd say go for it. You're the guys who put all the effort in, it's only fair you're doing that under conditions you're comfortable with. You don't need the wikia crew constantly breathing down your neck and interfering. The only thing they offer is "free" hosting, with the not-so-hidden cost of a fuckton of ads. If someone's happy to pay for hosting and domain names then go for it. The community is bound to support any decision you make and it's not like anyone's going to turn around and say "hey, we really like wikia" or anything.


    Also, as a small side note, (and entirely IMHO) I much preferred the layout of Entryway back when it looked like this.

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